Assessment of nutritional practice of pregnant women and associated factors following ANC services in Yeka sub city health centers, Addis Ababa.

Abstract

Abstract Background Pregnant mothers especially in developing countries do not get a balanced and diverse diet to meet their nutrient and energy requirements. This problem in Ethiopia is extensive in combination with repeated drought and food insecurity. Due to insufficient counseling of pregnant women on the importance of nutrition practices during antenatal care visits and other factors, pregnant mothers have poor nutritional practices that result in adverse birth outcomes. Methods Institutional based cross-sectional study designed was employed to collect the data from 404 pregnant women following ANC services in Yeka sub-city health centers from 6 June to 15 July 2022. Five health centers were selected using simple random sampling and pregnant women were selected using systematic random sampling after proportional allocation of the total sample. Structured questioner was used to collect the data and a 24-hour recall of dietary diversity questioner was also used to assess their dietary diversity. The data was entered into EpiData version 3.1 and exported to SPSS version 25. We used frequency, mean, and rang as descriptive statistics and bivariate and multivariate binary logistic regression was used to identify risk factors affecting the nutritional practices of pregnant women. Result In this study, we found that 179(44.31%) of pregnant women had high dietary diversity score with mean of 4.97 ± 2.014 SD and 183(45.3%0 of pregnant women had good food frequency. Finally, only 126(31.2%) of pregnant women had good nutritional practices during pregnancy. The risk factors that affect the nutritional practice of pregnant women was husband occupational status, income of household, habit of eating snacks, partner/husband involvement in pregnancy care, women empowerment on household economy. Conclusion In this study, we found that less than one-third of pregnant women had good nutritional practices. This calls the collaboration effort of all parties to enhance the nutritional status of pregnant women which is corner stone of all other nutritional interventions.